Dragonfly: A Tale of the Counter-Earth at the Cosmic Antipodes Read Online Free PDF

coming out of the opening was like foul breath. “Wait,” I said.
    The helots turned. Maruch smiled. “What is it, my friend?”
    “Do we have to go down there?”
    “Hela is where we live. Hela is where our friend lives.”
    “Do the songlines run through it?”
    Gehud muttered under his breath. Maruch kicked him. “Indeed they do. Of course, if you don’t want our help…”
    “No, I’ll come,” I said. The helots turned, and I followed them into the tunnel. I heard a muffled explosion somewhere out in the marshes. Sirens started to go off, but the sound was swiftly muted as we went down the shaft.
    “What is all that?” I asked.
    “That? Oh, that’s some accident. Don’t worry about it, Bronze. Someone will come take care of it soon.”
    Passages began to branch off in every direction. There were narrow lanes lined with lime-encrusted brick, vast echoing crypts and vaults. Yellow lights trembled, troubling the gloom. The air was heavy with the smells of rotten mortar and escaped gas.
    “What is this place?” I whispered, half to myself.
    “It is Hela,” said Maruch.
    “Did your people build all this?”
    “Hela is Old Enoch. The phylites pile the city higher and higher. When they want a new building, they knock down an old one and fill it in and build on top of it. Then helots come along and find parts that aren’t filled, or dig out parts that are.”
    Our way led down. It was like being in the belly of a behemoth. Gas pipes murmured along old alleys like clotted arteries. Dynamos thundered in the gloom, shooting jets of steam. The cavernous cloaca roared behind thick walls.
    We began to pass solitary helots, all pallid and pink-eyed like Maruch. It was a tenement district, but there were few people abroad. “Do helots sleep during the day?” I asked.
    “Mostly,” said Maruch. “They work the gas fields at night. When they have to go out in the sun, they wrap themselves up like this.”
    We turned from the main byways into a labyrinth of narrow corridors. At last we came to a metal door in a dead-end passage. Maruch rapped on it. A shutter slid open, then closed. A bolt shot back and the door swung inward. I followed my guides inside. The doorkeeper kept hidden in shadow.
    We went down a little flight of steps and through another door into a square room lined with benches. There was a long, tall table without chairs in the middle, and an iron gate on one side. Gehud swung it open, revealing a small cell with a solid metal door in the far wall.
    “You sit in there and wait,” said Maruch. “We’ll go around the far side to let you through.” I went in and sat. Gehud closed the gate and locked it. They both vanished.
    They were gone a long time. Despair settled on my shoulders. I read for songlines, but there were none. Enoch had obliterated them. I was unmoored, spinning helplessly through space.
    There was a buzz and a loud click. The metal door swung open, revealing a dank, tiled room and an identical door in the opposite wall. That door swung open, too. I went through them both.
    I was at the bottom of a large octagonal pit. The walls and floor were tiled with dirty green and white tiles, stained with mildew and rust and blood. Pipes stuck out from six of the walls, three on each side. There was a big gate in the seventh, opposite the door through which I had come. A drain yawned in the middle of the floor. Bright lights hung down from an unseen ceiling.
    “Well, was I lying?” came Maruch’s wheedle, drifting down out of the blackness beyond the lip of the pit.
    “You dragged me out of bed for that?”—an old woman’s voice—“Where did you find him?”
    “He was wandering around out beyond the fields. Sheol knows where he came from. A regular hatchling, he is! They don’t make them like that anymore.”
    “Five rods,” the woman said shortly. Her voice was like someone throwing gravel on a metal roof.
    “Five! Five rods! And him armed and dangerous! Almost killed the two